Managing Federations and Cooperative Management: A Report on ManFed.Com 2011

The first IFIP/IEEE international workshop on Managing Federations and Cooperative Management (ManFed.CoM) took place in conjunction with the IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2011) conference in Trinity College Dublin, Ireland on May 23rd 2011. The multi-mode, loosely coupled, user-centric nature of modern communications and services, coupled with the diversity of operator business models, ensure that modern end-to-end service provision frequently crosses heterogeneous management and administrative domains. Thus, management approaches that can be applied across organizational boundaries are increasingly important in a wide range of application areas. There are a number of significant, common, complex issues which must be addressed in all technologies and applications that involve federated organizations, yet research has heretofore been mostly confined to particular technical or application areas. The first installment of ManFed.Com addressed this gap by bringing together researchers from a broad array of application and technical areas who shared an interest in cross-domain management. The workshop drew out common themes, problems and issues encountered, and the solutions being designed to deal with the problems of managing information systems that span autonomous domains. More than 30 researchers participated in a lively and interactive day of paper presentation, panels and software demonstrations. The success of the inaugural event was such that the organizing committee is now committed to running further installations—we are in the process of preparing a submission to run a the 2nd ManFed.CoM in conjunction with the IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS) 2012 conference. We believe that these workshops will help to provide the basis for a common understanding and common approaches to inter-domain management and governance that synthesizes the insights and best-of-breed solutions being developed in the diverse areas in which these problems are encountered. The technical program of ManFed.CoM 2011 was organized as a single track and was composed of two panels of invited experts, two full paper sessions, one short paper session and a demonstration session in which practical software tools were presented. Of the 16 papers submitted, 6 were selected for presentation as full papers, with a further 3 being presented in condensed form as short papers. All the papers submitted underwent a rigorous review process, receiving between 2 and 5 reviews each, with the accepted full papers receiving a minimum score of 7.5 out of 10 from reviewers. The papers presented constituted a good cross-section of current cross-domain management research work—they covered modeling, semantic interoperability, trust management and security, policy based management, business process orchestration, collaboration and delegation and look at management on a number of different layers—from low level network management, all the way up to high level business-driven management.